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World tries to come to grips with the scourge of Ebola

The UN warned that unless the virus is stopped soon, up to 20,000 people could be infected by early November, with seven out of 10 dying.

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President Barack Obama, in a chilling assessment of international efforts to stem a deadly Ebola outbreak, said the world has not done enough to respond to the health crisis that poses a growing threat to global security. (Sept. 25)(AP)

As they do every year, global leaders converged in New York this week for the United Nations General Assembly — but on Thursday, the agenda was hijacked by a virus that was barely even on the world’s radar when it met this same time last year.

At Thursday’s high-level meeting on Ebola, world leaders and high-ranking officials took to the microphone and delivered dramatic statement after dramatic statement.

“We are talking about nothing less than a potential meltdown of this continent,” World Bank president Jim Yong Kim warned.

“Every day, every minute, counts,” said Margaret Chan, director general of the World Health Organization.

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Suffice it to say, the world has spoken; the question now is whether it will act. As the Ebola outbreak approaches its 40th week, here are the most important developments from the last seven days:

A wall offers information about Ebola in the Liberian city of Monrovia. World leaders were asked to pledge urgently needed aid to battle the virus, which is spreading at an alarming pace. (PASCAL GUYOT / AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

Canada scales up its Ebola response as the World Bank doubles its commitment

On Thursday, Minister of International Development Christian Paradis announced in New York that Canada will be giving another $30 million to the Ebola fight — money that will be channelled through the UN system and international organizations already on the ground. Canada had previously committed roughly $5 million towards the global response, in addition to $2.5 million in personal protective equipment.

Meanwhile, the World Bank also announced on Thursday it would be nearly doubling its financial contribution to $400 million.

Sierra Leone completes its three-day lockdown but seals off more districts

Sierra Leone’s three-day lockdown was hailed a success by officials who say it helped them find more than 130 additional cases that would have gone otherwise undetected. The drastic measure saw Sierra Leone’s six million people confined in their homes as 30,000 health workers went door to door, educating people about the disease and searching for unreported cases.

On Thursday, President Ernest Bai Koroma announced yet another drastic measure: the quarantining of another three districts, meaning about a third of Sierra Leone is now effectively sealed off. “Ebola as a disease is such that even an hour too late leads to exponential transmissions,” Koroma said at the UN. “That is why faster response, of a kind similar to responses to natural disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes, is required.”

The World Health Organization publishes a grim Ebola report …

On Monday, the WHO’s Ebola response team published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine reporting on the first nine months of the epidemic (while the outbreak was first recognized in March, epidemiologists believe it actually began as early as December). The paper sketched a rough picture of what we currently know about this outbreak — the majority of patients are between 15 and 44, the virus appears to be affecting men and women in equal measures, and roughly seven out of every 10 patients have died.

But most alarmingly, the WHO team said that if control measures are not improved, there could be more than 20,000 cases — by early November. According to the authors, the world must now face the possibility that Ebola, at least in the medium term, could become endemic in West Africa, “a prospect that has never previously been contemplated.”

… and the U.S. publishes an even grimmer one

But on Tuesday morning, as the world was still absorbing the WHO’s latest revelations, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its own worst-case scenario — one where Ebola’s toll reaches 550,000 by the end of January, or even 1.4 million if unreported cases are included.

These dramatic figures were arrived at using a new modelling tool developed by the CDC — and they only include Sierra Leone and Liberia (data from Guinea was too unreliable so was excluded from this projection). But CDC director Thomas Frieden pointed out that these numbers are unlikely to materialize because the modelling tool used data that was already several weeks old; it also failed to consider the recent surge in the world’s emergency response.

For Frieden, the modelling tool also revealed glimmers of hope. “The model has very important findings,” he said. “A surge now can break the back of the epidemic; it is possible and we can be on track to turning it around. But the costs of delay are significant.”

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